Update: In interviews with E&E News and ScienceInsider,
Bates has denied being the whistleblower the House Science Committee
has cited in the past, although his accusations are very similar to
those cited by the Committee chairman.

Original article follows

On Sunday, the UK tabloid Mail on Sundayalleged
a seemingly juicy (if unoriginal) climate science scandal. At its core,
though, it’s not much more substantial than claiming the Apollo 11
astronauts failed to file some paperwork and pretending this casts doubt
on the veracity of the Moon landing.

The story’s author, David Rose, has published a
great many sensational articles over the years, falsely claiming to
present evidence undermining the threat of climate change or the human
cause behind it. But this latest article is noteworthy in that it
appears to reveal the supposed “whistleblower” who has been cited by the
US House Science Committee in its ongoing clash with climate scientists
at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The committee’s Twitter account, as well as the account of Committee Chair Lamar Smith (R-Texas), has gone hog-wild tweeting about the story. For example, the committee account tweeted, “@NOAA obstructed the committee's oversight at every turn. Now we know what they were hiding.”

The research at the center of the supposed scandal was a 2015 paper published in Science
by a group of NOAA researchers. The paper presented an update to NOAA’s
global surface temperature record using newly updated land and ocean
databases—each of which had previously been published in peer-reviewed
scientific journals. The update resulted in slight changes to NOAA’s
numbers for some recent years, which slightly increased the short-term
rise since 1998 (the adjustment brought NOAA's record closer to other
major datasets).

The paper concluded that there was no evidence
of a slowdown in global warming over the last decade or so, an
idea that had been a focus of people who reject the seriousness of
human-caused climate change.

Rather than engage with the science behind
this paper, Rep. Lamar Smith has, without any evidence, accused the NOAA
scientists of doctoring their results to exaggerate recent warming.
Although NOAA provided Smith with the (publicly available) data and
methods behind the paper and provided a personal explanation of the
research, Smith subpoenaed the e-mails of the scientists and other NOAA
staff. NOAA handed over staff e-mails but refused to make the
researchers’ e-mails available for a fishing expedition, citing the
importance of protecting scientists’ ability to communicate freely while
trying to understand their data.

Rep. Smith claimed that a whistleblower at
NOAA had provided his office with information proving that the study had
been inappropriately rushed for political reasons. The Mail on Sunday claims the same thing and presents NOAA scientist John Bates as a whistleblower.

The whistleblower

Bates recently retired from NOAA after a
career working primarily on satellite measurements used for weather
forecasting. Recently, he was also in charge of data-archiving efforts
for satellite and surface temperature records. Bates alleges that NOAA's
Tom Karl and the rest of the team behind the paper failed to adequately
follow NOAA’s internal processes for archiving their data and
stress-testing the updated databases they used.

Bates also questions the way in which some sea
surface temperature measurements were adjusted to sync them up with the
rest of the measurements, falsely claiming that the technique alters
the warming trend.

In a blog post,
Maynooth University research Peter Thorne—who worked on both the land
and sea databases underlying the Karl paper but not the Karl paper
itself—disputed many of Bates’ claims. First off, Thorne notes that
Bates was not personally involved in the research at any stage. And
while Bates claims that Karl made a series of choices to exaggerate the
apparent warming trend, Thorne points out that this would be difficult
for Karl to do since he didn’t contribute to the underlying databases.
Karl’s paper simply ran those updated databases through the same
algorithm NOAA was already using.

Ars talked with Thomas Peterson, a co-author
on the Karl paper who has since retired. Peterson provided some useful
context for understanding Bates’ allegations. The satellites that Bates
worked with were expensive hardware that couldn't be fixed if anything
went wrong after they were launched. The engineering of the software
running those satellites sensibly involved testing and re-testing and
re-testing again to ensure no surprises would pop up once it was too
late.

Bates expected the same approach from his
surface temperature counterparts, but Peterson explained that their work
with weather station data was not nearly so high-stakes—problems could
easily be fixed on the fly. The engineering-style process NOAA was using
for endlessly double-checking the software for all dataset updates
could drag on for quite a long time—years, in fact—and Bates opposed any
attempt to speed this up. Peterson and other scientists were naturally
anxious to incorporate changes they knew were scientifically important.

Bates alleges that the Karl paper was “rushed”
for political reasons, but Peterson said the reality was that NOAA was
well behind the times, waiting to include known improvements like
additional recording stations in the rapidly warming Arctic. “I had been
arguing for years that we were putting out data that did not reflect
our understanding of how the temperature was actually warming—[for]
literally years we slowed down to try to account for some of these
processing things that we had to do,” Peterson said. (At the time of the
Karl paper, NOAA’s dataset showed less warming in recent years than
other datasets, like NASA’s.)

Bates also claims that there were bugs in the
land station database software that were ignored in the Karl paper. But
according to Peterson, the slight day-to-day variability seen in the
software’s output was simply the result of the fact that new data was added every day.
Stations that straddled statistical cut-offs might fall on one side of
the dividing line today, and on the other side tomorrow. There was
nothing wrong with the software, they realized. It was just silly to
re-run it every single day.

There may also be something beyond simple
“engineers vs. scientists” tension behind Bates’ decision to go public
with his allegations. Two former NOAA staffers confirmed to Ars that Tom
Karl essentially demoted John Bates in 2012, when Karl was Director of
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Bates had held
the title of Supervisory Meteorologist and Chief of the Remote Sensing
Applications Division, but Karl removed him from that position partly
due to a failure to maintain professionalism with colleagues, assigning
him to a position in which he would no longer supervise other staff. It
was apparently no secret that the demotion did not sit well with Bates.

Let’s ask the data

Office politics aside, the claims in the Mail on Sunday
article that the Karl paper exaggerated the warming trend fall down
when you examine any of the other surface temperature datasets. In a
paper we recently covered,
a team led by Berkeley researcher Zeke Hausfather compared the updated
sea surface temperature dataset to shorter but simpler and independent
sets of measurements made by satellites and automated floats. That
analysis confirmed that the updated dataset is more accurate than its
predecessor.

In a post for Carbon Brief,
Hausfather noted that NOAA’s updated dataset doesn't cause it to show
more warming than the datasets run by NASA, the Berkeley team, and the
UK Met Office. Instead, the update caused NOAA to stop showing less warming than everyone else.

The House Science Committee’s Twitter account has yet to tweet a link to Hausfather's story.

Hausfather also points out a glaring error in the Mail on Sunday
article that illustrates its author’s lack of knowledge. The article
includes a graph of both the NOAA and UK Met Office records. The NOAA
data appears to be roughly 0.1°C warmer than the UK Met Office data
across the entire time span—supposedly evidence of “flawed NOAA data
showing higher temperatures.” Apart from the fact that a constant offset
would have no impact on temperature trends,
the offset is simply a mistake. The numbers in the two datasets are
calculated relative to different baselines—the 1901-2000 average for
NOAA, and the 1961-1990 average for the Met Office. Once you put them on
a common baseline, the differences largely disappear.

The Mail on Sunday
updated the caption to note that the datasets “are offset in
temperature by 0.12°C due to different analysis techniques,” but the
graph remains unchanged. And it's not clear how many Mail readers will understand the importance of this offset.

For a final example of its author's incompetence, the Mail on Sunday article claims that NOAA has seen the error of its ways and that it's suddenly working on a new
version (version 5) of the sea surface temperature database that
reverts the previous changes and reduces the cooling trend again. In
reality, the new version is just the normal process beginning the next
update, which will incorporate data from the growing fleet of autonomous
floats, among other things. It's happening because version 4 is now over three years old.
Hausfather notes that while the preliminary version 5 does indeed
reduce the recent warming trend by about 10 percent, it still shows 50 percent more warming than the version Bates and Lamar Smith seem to like.

The article on the Daily Mail
website is headlined “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into
investing billions over manipulated global warming data," but the list
of those “duped” seems to be limited to the author of the story and any
readers who make the mistake of trusting it. Sadly, those believers
include the head of the House Science Committee.